This chapter surveys Grimshaw’s writing from its Ulster origins and considers her as one of several independent women writers in the period who successfully adapted an instinctive feminism to the increasing conservatism of an international publishing marketplace in the 1890s. It focuses on one of Grimshaw’s novels, the romantic literary thriller Broken Away (1897), set in Portadown, Dublin, Wicklow and London, as a portrait of the fin-de-siècle commercial Irish author. The chapter considers the novel’s commentary on the pressurised concept of the ‘New Woman’ in the light of the changing editorial priorities of Grimshaw’s first publisher John Lane/The Bodley Head, as the company attempted to distance itself from the decadence of Wilde and Beardsley on one hand, and the feminist excesses of George Egerton on the other. It compares this initial foray with a later publishing encounter, this time with the recently-formed Mills and Boon, who produced Grimshaw’s 1911 adventure story When the Red Gods Call, the tale of an Irishman’s fortunes in New Guinea. In this case, Grimshaw’s astute response to the tastes of an expanding popular readership can be seen to have dovetailed with the marketing and distribution skills of her new publishers, paving the way to her status as a bestselling author.
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For some forty years before her death in Australia in 1953, Grimshaw’s pioneering travels and adventures in the South Seas gave her global celebrity as she drew on her experiences for an extensive output of travel writing, popular cultural anthropology, more than thirty travel-based romantic adventure novels, and hundreds of short stories, published internationally. (84)
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At the end of 1909, she wrote to her friend, Sir Hubert Murray, the Lieutenant-General of Papua New Guinea, that she considered ‘the market is ripe for New Guinea literature’. She had identified a genre of romantic adventure set in the South Seas that was perfectly suited to her talent for storytelling and vivid narrative, defending the tenor of her output with defiance: ‘no one should be ashamed of writing a good story’, she insisted, ‘that is, no author should, as so many modern authors do, consider plot and subject matter as something of no importance and concentrate solely on method and subjective interest’. Sensationalism was key, and, while she maintained that her Catholicism (she had converted at the age of twenty-four) ensured that her stories were moral and without ‘coarseness’, as she put it, her plots frequently involved lurid love triangles (often involving an Irishman and a Briton, with the troublesome issue of miscegenation usually resolved by the tragic but honourable death of the native wife, thus permitting the marriage of her white characters). She enthusiastically included grisly accounts of murder, headhunting, and cannibalism. Grimshaw’s first and perhaps most important attempt at the genre of romantic literary adventures was When the Red Gods Call, set in Papua New Guinea and published in 1911. With its title derived from Kipling, the story features Irishman Hugh Lynch, who, having settled in Papua, finds himself imprisoned on false charges of having killed his native wife. (92)
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When the Red Gods Call was followed by some thirty-three romantic adventure stories in the same vein, including White Savage Simon (1919), The Terrible Island (1920), My South Sea Sweetheart (1921), The Mystery of Tumbling Reef (1932), and Murder in Paradise (1940). Grimshaw moved on from Mills & Boon in the early 1920s to the popular publisher Hurst & Blackett. (93-94)
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she was a New Woman passionately committed to female independence who nonetheless penned endless commercial romances sustaining and perpetuating a patriarchal culture–one in which women, ultimately, fall into line with their husbands. This final element–a seemingly hidebound treatment of love and marriage in her work–is perplexing. (95)
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